عناصر النجاح في المدارس المستقلة المتميزة في دولة قطر : دراسة تقويمية
The independency initiative which is meant to provide schools with more freedom in managing their technical, administrative and financial affairs has received a great attention on the part of those responsible for education and its development all over the world during the past two decades. Yet this initiative did not receive the due attention in the Arab countries which remained adherent to centralization in managing the educational process till the initiative was launched in Qatar. It depended on four principles namely: independency, accountability, variation and selection. Based on this initiative the supreme council for education was established to supervise the application of the independent school’s initiative which later overtook the privileges of the Ministry of Education. Accountability represents one of the principles of independency in the initiative of developing education in Qatar. It took various forms of which the comprehensive educational assessment conducted by the supreme council every year is one. The current study is an attempt to reveal the factors making the independent schools in Qatar distinguished focusing on the schools whose students showed high academic achievement to identify the factors that led to the success of these schools in performing their roles. A sample of the schools whose students had the maximum level of content in the tests of the comprehensive assessment in the year 2010-2011 was selected. The sample comprised 394 staff members of the distinguished independent schools in Qatar. The researcher employed the descriptive research methodology with the questionnaire as a tool for data collection. The results showed that the great majority of the sample agree that the principles recurrent in many studies proved their worth and effectiveness in reinforcing the distinction of the independent schools in Qatar. As for the self-managed schools that enjoy some independency showed that the vision postulated by each school was characterized by clarity and was effectively used in orienting decisions and concentrating on the academic achievement standard of students. The freedom enjoyed by the independent schools in authority and decision taking helped them to modify the methods of teaching to facilitate teaching content. This freedom also helped managers to select the best teaching and managerial staff as well as disposing of the inefficient ones specially the non-Qatari. Results also showed that the team work style enabled these schools to make good achievements and orient the professional development programs so that they become consistent with the school’s vision and the needs of teachers. (Published abstract)